RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is one type of web content syndication format. RSS web feeds have become more and more popular on the web and numerous software applications with RSS support are being developed. These numerous applications can have many varied features and can lead users to install several different RSS-enabled applications. Each RSS application will typically have its own list of subscriptions. When the list of subscriptions is small, it is fairly easy for a user to enter and manage those subscriptions across the different applications. As the list of subscriptions grows, however, management of the subscriptions in connection with each of these different RSS-enabled applications becomes very difficult. Thus, it is very easy for subscription lists to become unsynchronized.
In addition, web feeds come in several different file formats, with the popular ones being RSS 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom. Each RSS-enabled application has to support most of these formats and possibly even more in the future. Implementing parsers for use in the RSS context for some applications is more difficult than for others. Given that not all application developers are RSS experts who possess experience and knowledge with regard to the intricacies of each format, it is unlikely that all application developers will implement the parsers correctly. Hence, it is likely given the rich number of file formats that some application developers will opt to not develop applications in this space or, if they do, the applications will not be configured to fully exploit all of the features that are available across the different file formats.
Another aspect of RSS and web feeds pertains to the publishing of content. For example, the number of users with blogs (weblogs) is increasing. There are many publicly available services that provide free blog services. Publishing content to a blog service, however, can be rather cumbersome since it might involve opening a browser, navigating to the blog service, signing in, and then typing the entry and submitting it. Many application developers would prefer to be able to publish from within their particular application, without breaking the user flow by having to go to a website. In addition, there are many different types of protocols that can be used to communicate between a client device and a particular service. Given this, it is unlikely that application developers will implement all protocols. As such, the user experience will not be all that it could be.